Scanner software for Brother mfc8480dn

This says MFC8480DN

This/that/your link says MFC4800; not the same thing at all.

I see:

This is what open-printing/cups says about that printer (supported):

I don't exactly know what it means that brother's site has a '24 dated .deb installer for the printer & scanner & another '25 dated 'scan key' enabling scanning from the machine's input.

Thanks for catching my error, I must have backed up to the wrong page.

But it doesn't say anything about scanning.

I'm still a bit hazy on what a "scanner driver" does. Seems to me it'd still require a user interface system of some sort to manage the files generated by scanning. The term "twain" keeps cropping up, is it something like PostScript or PCL, but for scanning? Presumably the UI needs to run on the native hardware, unless it's in something like Java.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

My Canon Pixma is hooked up USB to this LM system I'm posting here based on Ub.

My default scanner is called document scanner which is in my repo/s just like xsane and I believe it is called simple scan in the package manager. It recognized the Pixma and was ready to scan.

I did some looking for your Brother, it is is covered by simple scan; all of those are just front ends for sane.

Altho' my RPi isn't up right now, I assume that simple scan is in its software manager and should be able to deal w/ your Brother.

Also, while looking at the brother docs, you have a control panel which has a scan function.

$ apt search simplescan Sorting... Done Full Text Search... Done bob@raspberrypi:~/Documents/driver_license$ Looks like nothing found.

Not sure what that refers to. The original printer control software for Mac OS was called "Control Panel", and the printer has a physical control panel with the ability to export scanned files to a USB device. I am hoping to run the whole show from the Pi5.

Another correspondent sent this link:

Thanks very much for writing!

bob prohaska

Its package is simple-scan

$ apt search simple-scan Sorting... Done Full Text Search... Done simple-scan/oldstable 42.5-2 arm64 Simple Scanning Utility

If you are bookworm:

Apparently since trixie, Deb is supporting riscv much more strongly. They are amazing in terms of packages and architectures.

This isn't about Brother or RPi, but my Canon & LM w/ simple-scan which LM calls Document scanner.

I scanned a color graphical document w/ Ds ie simple-scan; I was able to crop the scan field prior to scanning and choose gray scale or color (I typically use grayscale because my printer is only black ink) and save the scan as a .pdf.

If I were going to scan my driver license to send it, I would scan in color.

Personally, I'm in a linux 99% of the time, I don't do very much printing or scanning; but when I do, I do it in Win7 because I prefer the Win tools and results, IrfanView for graphical handling and superior printer management for my limited purposes.

My point is that if I were trying to do it w/ RPi & Brother, I would be using a combination of Brother tools and simple-scan.

Does it have the ability to scan to a USB stick? That might be the least painful way to do it -- then move the stick to your Pi and get the scans off there that way.

When it comes to scanning I think gscan2pdf is much better than the Win tool that comes with Canon scanners. IrfanView sure is hard to beat because it has been in active development for so long, but I find that nomacs comes quite close.

-jw-

IV FAQ has for years had instructions for using IV in linux; WINE + a Win .dll. Since I've had multiple machines around me for so long, and since there has always been a Win 'accessible', I've never really bothered much w/ WINE.

I usually scan w/ IV, not a 'Canon' scanner.

That's exactly the solution I adopted for my Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner. I can point a web browser at it and play with its setup screens all I want, but I've never been able to scan via a network connection. Oh well, it's a nice little unit otherwise, and plugging in a thumb drive is no great hardship.

On the other hand, I have no trouble scanning with my Epson WF-2760 all-in-one from my Linux box; I use simple-scan or naps2 depending on my needs. But they can't find the Brother.

Yes, it will scan to USB. That may be my best option.

It turns out that quite a bit of SANE software is already installed on the Pi, perhaps in an earlier iteration of this same goose-chase.

Near as I can tell both simple-scan and xsane run fine but expect a USB scanner. The mfc8480dn is connected via wired Ethernet on my LAN and printing works fine, so it's best not to rock that boat.

There's something called sane-net. It looks like that might be a bridge of sorts between USB-seeking scanner software and an Ethernet-connected scanner. It's present, including the man page. If I'm mistaken, please let me know.

I know the machine can scan over Ethernet using the old Brother Control Center software on the Mac, but that's really clumsy. An attempt to find the Brotherfirmware version number using the front panel fails, but the web interface reports S, while the Brother support page at

It looks like a Web search for "Brother Control Center Linux" turns up a few hits, I'll explore those before doing anything else.

Thanks for writing.

bob prohaska

Interesting, I have an Epson WF model too (WF-3725). So I could probably figure out a way to scan from that directly to my main Linux machine ... if I could be bothered ... ;)

It's starting to look like at least some setup is needed on the Pi. Sane-net is present (there's a man page for it) but I don't think anything is running. Saned likewise has a man page but does not seem to be running. I'm starting to think they're needed, but haven't seen much in the way of "howto" guidance to get them running.

Neither comes up in the Add/Remove Programs dialog.

With very low expectations I emailed Brother support and got a prompt reply. The respondent is asking reasonable questions and so far replied with intelligent followup questions. The MFC8480 has a telnet interface along with the web interface. Neither seems to have any scanning-related commands, but being telnet there's likely more than meets the eye under the hood.

Thanks for reading, and any ideas

bob prohaska

Interesting ...

One obvious thing to try is to connect via Telnet and type “help␤”, and see what, if anything, it responds with.

Kind of a shot in the dark, but ... can’t hurt ...

You're likely going to want some config to tell Sane about what kind of scanner you have, how to find it and what kind of driver to use. This is for Arch where they have a variety of scanner packages:

but it's also worth doing the general SANE config they describe:

Theo

I have an Epson ET-3760 that's only connected over Ethernet. Looking at the Arch install on one of my boxes indicates that sane-airscan is installed in addition to sane and xsane. The scanner is discoverable over the network and both xsane and gscan2pdf can use it. If your device isn't too old, you might want to give it a shot. It should be available on the Raspberry Pi:

Make sure you have a good TCP/IP connection, then fire up xsane.

Put my printer on the network?? Never.

When simple-scan is open, it has info:

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret that info, but it DOES sound like it should be able to detect a network scanner.